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Tag: Best Practices

A bit of a refresh of a post from 2011: Six best practices for every mailer. I still think best practices are primarily technical and that how senders present themselves to recipients is more about messaging and branding than best practices. These 6 best practices from 2011 are no longer best, these days, they’re the absolute minimum […]

What really are the best practices for email? A year ago I wrote a post about best practices and how most of my best practices were different from what other people recommend. I don’t talk about rules for frequency or subject line length. I don’t focus on best practices for bounce processing or content length. My […]

Yesterday I talked about how the truth matters in email marketing. But that’s not the only place the truth matters. Today I found myself in a bit of a … discussion on Facebook. It ended up being a lesson in why you should never trust the clickbait headline. I also realized there are parallels with […]

“We follow all the best practices!” is a common refrain from many senders. But what does best practices really mean? To me the bulk of best practices are related to permission, technical setup and identity. Send opt-in mail. Follow the SMTP spec. Authenticate your mail with DKIM. Publish a SPF record. Don’t hide you domain whois […]

Each month, we like to focus on a core email feature or function and present an overview for people looking to learn more. This month, we addressed authentication with SPF. We also talked about feedback mechanisms, and the importance for senders to participate in FBL processes. In our ongoing discussions about spam filters, we took […]

M3AAWG publishes documents summarizing and discussing current practices for stopping and preventing abuse. Some of these documents are focused on ISPs while others are focused on marketers. While M3AAWG is not directly nor officially a standards body, most of the documents have been written by members and reflect the best current practices for that document. […]

Return Path published their most recent Global Deliverability report this morning. (Get the Report) This shows that inbox placement of mail has decreased 6% in the second half of 2011. This decrease is the largest decrease Return Path has seen in their years of doing this report. To be honest, I’m not surprised at the […]

People get into all sorts of details when talking about best practices. But so much of email depends on the type of email and the target market and the goals of the sender. It’s difficult to come up with universal best practices. I’ve said in the past that I think that best practices are primarily […]

There are a several approaches to authenticating email, and the different authentication methods have a lot of different settings to choose from (sometimes because they’re useful, other times just because they were designed by committee). It’s nice that they have that flexibility for the complex situations that might benefit from them, but almost all the […]

You can't technical your way out of the bulk folder. I wrote that a year and a half ago, and it's even more true today. Filters at the big webmail providers continue to evolve to meet new threats and new spamming techniques. Sending technically perfect mail won't get your mail into the inbox. Recipients have to want the mail and interact with the mail for good delivery.
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